Busted! The evidence is in and it shows beyond a doubt lockdowns don’t work. The government has wrecked our economy for nothing.
Let’s start with New York.
The above chart shows the number of cases per day. New York went into lockdown on 20 March. Even taking into account a two week “buffer” the lockdown shows no evidence of making any difference. In fact case numbers only start going down around 14 April.
Now let’s look at the UK.
The UK went into lockdown 23 March. Again we see the lockdown making no difference with case numbers starting to go down only around 6 May.
Florida, same thing (lockdown started 1 April).
In Italy, the lockdown was imposed March 22 when COVID there had already peaked.
Same with Australia, with New South Wales and Victoria going into lockdown around 25 March, just as COVID was about to or close to peaking.
But wait, you say. The reason why lockdown didn’t work in places like New York and the UK is because it was imposed too late. No.
Here’s Russia, who went into lockdown on March 28.
Notice how when Russia went into lockdown it only had 228 cases and by 11 May it had well over 11K.
Ditto for India, who went into lockdown March 24.
Yep, they definitely flattened the curve in India /sarc.
But, you say, the reason the lockdowns didn’t work is because they weren’t tried hard enough. Leaving aside that this is the catch-cry of prohibitionists everywhere who have been caught out (and lockdowns are a form of prohibition or least based on the same faulty reasoning), here is Poland, who imposed some of the tightest restrictions in Europe.
In the case of Poland you could even argue that instead of “flattening the curve” all the lockdown has done is extent the natural course of the virus.
Which leads me to the “containment” argument; the pillar upon which all forms of prohibition rests. Did lockdowns “contain” the Covid virus? Would the number of cases be exponentially higher if there were no lockdowns? First let’s have a look Sweden, where there has been no lockdown.
Overall we see a curve pretty similar to places which did impose lockdowns, almost as if (shock, horror) lockdowns make no difference.
Now let’s look at Japan, who rejected lockdown because of the cost to the economy.
Like us, Japan has a moat and is of similar land size. The difference is Japan has a much higher population and a much higher population density. As of 28 May 2020 Japan had 16,696 confirmed cases of Covid. As of the same date we had 1,154 confirmed cases. Japan’s population is 126.5 million. New Zealand’s population is 4.9 million. Based on population difference alone if New Zealand had the same population as Japan we would have at least around 28,000 cases of Covid. And that’s not taking into account that Covid growth is exponential and the difference in population density. Realistically, in my opinion, if we were Japan, we would have 50,000 plus cases, easy.
And speaking of New Zealand.
The government and the complicit media is trying to sell you this as proof the lockdown worked. Firstly, we didn’t go hard and early. In fact when the lockdown was imposed we were only a week or so from Covid reaching its peak. Secondly taken in context what we see is what would have happened if we had just taken simple precautions.
Of course, I’m far from the only one questioning the effectiveness of lockdowns. The Norwegian public health authority reports that not only was COVID not spreading as fast as feared, but it was already on the way down when the lockdown in Norway was ordered. Further, they conclude the same outcomes could have been achieved using simple precautions such as voluntary social distancing. What say you now, Jacinda?
I was willing to give the lockdown a chance. Even though it could be argued that for example Covid carriers were the equivalent of drug dealers I thought that maybe there was a difference such that an analogy couldn’t really be drawn. But this is the (literally) billion dollar lesson for us all. Prohibition in any form doesn’t work. Trying to control the risk of harm of *anything* by draconian attempts to control people’s behaviour doesn’t work. What does work, as proven by Japan and Sweden, is harm reduction. The reason harm reduction works is because it appeals to people’s own self interest and judgment. Or to put it another way, given the right information, people more often than not will do the right thing.
As one commentator on The BFD said, it is deeply ironic that the government is moving strongly towards a harm reduction approach when it comes to managing the risk of harm from such things as the misuse of drugs but took such a prohibitionist approach when it came to COVID. If the National Party was any opposition they would at each and every opportunity be hammering the government and its hypocrisy and its decision to impose a lockdown. Instead, we’ve had to put up with a clown in a suit replaced by a woke joke.
Time to end the lockdown.